Rock the Bells photos/rants

I have to be honest. I should have just pointed the camera at the crowd at this year’s Rock the Bell’s Festival at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. I have never seen so many white people with cornrows. It was outstanding. Where do they all go when they leave the concert venue? Back to Pleasanton? Do they have to undo the knots and comb their pompadour back out? Or do they always have cornrows? Were they born that way?

Ugh, so many questions.

But instead of riveting photojournalism, I bring you some leftover shots that I forgot to put up a few months ago.

This is Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s son. He performed with the Wu-Tang Clan in place of his father, cuz his father’s dead. I don’t know his name. He probably doesn’t have one. ODB seems like the kind of guy who would forget to name his kid. It’d be funny if his name was Matt, though. But not that funny.

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This is Method Man. I have a lot of photography friends, nerds, who would tell me all about how this photo sucks and about how much better their photo would look if they brought their $90,000 Canon EOS ID with a lens made of unicorn retinas. Well, that’s what I used, too, assholes.

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This is A Tribe Called Quest. But I’m too pissed off at photography nerds to talk about a rap group. When I was little, nerds were different than they are now. Now, it’s cool to be a nerd, but when I was little, nerds were drooling sociopaths who showed up to school in suits of armor and tried to probe girls with their wooden swords. That’s what David did, at least. One day, David showed up in a suit of armor and the next day he was gone. No one ever saw him again. The other day I saw a girl wearing an I Love Nerds shirt, but she was studying for a test at junior college. That’s like Justin Bieber claiming Crip. Leave it to popular culture to fuck up some pure shit, like nerds. And rap music. Ta da!

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This is Q-Tip, from A Tribe Called Quest–my favorite group of all time. Never mind their shitty albums, like the Love Movement and Beats, Rhymes and Life. Before rap died a miserable death, they were the shit. Now they’re older, getting fatter and not nearly as interesting, but Q-Tip and Pfife are like Sonny and Cher in my book. Do you know what’s insane, though? I was just looking around on Facebook and I found a kid I went to elementary school with back in Boston. I think we were in fourth grade when I saw him standing in front of his apartment. I was across the street, really far away, so I thought I would throw a rock at him. Just to scare him. So I found a rock and threw it. The rock hit him right in the center of his forehead, split his head open and he went to the hospital. He ended up getting like 10 stitches. I felt really bad. But I also felt a little bit good because of my impeccable aim. One step closer to becoming a ninja, I thought. Anyway, the dude is now a Hasidic Jew. Beard and everything. He looks really nice. Trip out, Facebook. Trip out.

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Snoop Dog. I don’t really give a shit about Snoop Dog. I think he felt that vibe, though. I’m pretty sure he realized that people who really listen to music didn’t want to listen to hours of Snoop doing his bullshit pop songs. So for this performance, he performed Doggy Style in its entirety, which was really rad. If you remember, when Snoop first came out he was this little gangbanger who looked like a hungry-ass preying mantis. Now he’s just a parody of himself. From all the reports, Snoop wasn’t even a real Crip. He was just a scrawny weirdo who wanted to be in a gang. Which reminds me that I used to want to be in the Latin Kings. I knew a dude who was a Latin King and when I asked him if I could be in his gang he laughed and told me to go write a book. He called me a nerd. And then I thought of David, from elementary school, and how he wore armor and carried a sword that he used to probe chicks with. Man, that dude was cool. I wonder what he’s up to now.